Sometimes reading through police reports is like reading through the outcomes of a heated tournament of Clue™, except instead of Mrs. Peacock with the candlestick in the conservatory, you get girl with stiletto (sharp and painful!) at China Harbor’s all-ages nightclub (.pdf). Or, in the case of last Monday morning, a dude using a pair of scissors in an attempted grocery store holdup.

According to a police report, on Monday, January 10, at approximately 3:45 a.m., a man entered what is most likely the QFC on the 500 block of Mercer Street—with what appears to be a poorly thought-out effort to rob the place. His technique—just taking items off the shelves and putting them into a duffel bag in plain sight—left something to be desired in the way of stealth, and three employees immediately caught on.

When confronted, the suspect became “verbally abusive towards the employees,” according to the police report, leading one employee to call 911. The suspect then reached into his back right pocket, in a manner that screamed—at least to the employees—that he was grabbing a concealed weapon. Indeed, he was armed. Only, instead of a gun, the suspect whipped out the pair of “red over grey scissors” and pointed the tip menacingly at his naysayers.

But the employees were not cowed. Working as a team, they tackled the suspect and restrained him on the floor in the magazine aisle until police arrived. Clearly, they had prepared for this moment.

When questioned by the police after the incident, the suspect admitted to his attempted robbery at scissors-point. Furthermore, the suspect said that the “reason he had threatened [the victims] with scissors and had attempted to steal the merchandise was because he had ‘body lice.’“

Which, to be fair, can’t be very much fun.

17 replies on “Colonel Mustard, In the Grocery Store, with the Scissors”

  2. Megan dear, I hate to sound nit-picky, but there is no South Mercer Street. There’s an East Mercer St, a West Mercer St, and just plain Mercer Street. That QFC is on plain Mercer St.

    It’s important because if things don’t work out in your literary career, you may end up in city work like me, and they test you on things like that.

  8. I think you mean “cowed”, not “kowtowed”.
    To cow (transitive verb) is to intimidate (related, I believe, to the words “cower” and possibly “coward”). To kowtow (intransitive verb) is to prostrate oneself in such a way as to touch one’s forehead to the ground (the usual obeisance with which the Emperors of China were greeted).

  9. “kowtow”, does not mean does not mean “intimidate”, but rather “make obeisance”. I think the word you are looking for is “cowed”.
    Thus, “The employees were not cowed by the suspect, and thus they did not kowtow to him.”

  11. Or alternatively, the story could go:

    It sucks to have mental health problems, live on the streets, be eaten up with crawlies, have addiction issues and have society ignore your pleas for help because they don’t want to pay more taxes.

  13. @11, as much as I agree with your alternate reality, in the real world it still sucks to constantly have bums brazenly stealing shit and threatening to stab people. A lot of these nutters on the street want to be ignored, or at least think they do, and unless we change the way we do involuntary commitments it’s going to stay this way.

  16. hmmm… Complete assholery, intern. Way to exploit/ridicule the mentally unstable. Good thing that the events in Tuscon did not in any way alter the way the Stranger handles discourse on matters related to the mentally unstable.

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